Men Do Not Go to War Over Women

Andrew Rissik's Troy, a four-and-a-half-hour radio trilogy, was first broadcast in 1998. Gina Landor's adaptation fillets 75 minutes from the original to show an old story from a new perspective. The siege of Troy and the behaviour of Menelaus and Agamemnon is told through the testimony of Helen and Klytemnestra, sisters who are central to the drama and yet somehow seem peripheral to the derring-do of the men in most versions of the story.

This doesn't entirely escape the pitfalls of the one-person play, and there are odd moments when the production, with its projected map of the Aegean, has the feel of a geography lesson. But for the most part it is an unusually riveting solo-actor piece thanks to a simple, clever design, a winning performance from Landor herself, and Rissik's spine-tingling writing, which is hard and dazzling like a beautiful diamond and yet is touched by compassion and wisdom. At the very least, this production should encourage some enterprising company to look back at the original and consider its suitability for a full staging.

The piece begins and ends with Helen. But these are two very different women. The first rises like a mermaid out of a sea of pink. This woman knows she is beautiful, but takes no pleasure in it. Her beauty is deadly, her situation desperate. She cannot love her husband Menelaus - "I never open my mouth; he never closes his." She is easy prey for Paris. She colludes in her own seduction and yet is surprised by love that is "roused like thunder from a summer sky".

Many years and a lifetime later we meet Helen again. She has been stripped of her beauty and her illusions, and yet now she glows. She lost herself in love and found herself in the process.

In between we see Klytemnestra, in mourning for her life and her daughter Iphigenia sacrificed on the altar of her father's desire for success in war. No, men do not go to war over women but for reasons of their own: empire, glory, treasure. Klytemnestra's story demonstrates the truth of that. Landor is excellent, and Emily Couper's design provides a shroud-like set behind which candles burn. But it is Rissik's writing that makes you catch your breath, with its constantly surprising turns of phrase. "Legends are like dreams, they tell us what we need to know," suggests Rissik. Here, he uses ancient stories to show us how to live and love.